Greetings from the American home of Pinot Noir.  Yesterday was a full day of awesome sites, beautiful weather and, of course, great wine.  I’ll try to keep up to date this week and bring you tidbits of the places we visit and the wines we taste.

We landed in Portland in the morning, but didn’t stay in town for long.  We did stop for lunch though and catch up on the college football scores since we missed most of the midday games (Go Gators!).  The first stop in Willamette Valley was Beaux Freres (pronounce Bo-Frare), which requires RSVP and offers a quick tour of their vineyard and a nice in-depth history of the owner, the vineyard and farming techniques – Helen, our tour guide, did a great job!  That might be too much for new wine drinkers, but for me it was cool to hear how someone with a passion can change professions and become successful on their own.  Keep in mind this is truly a farm (and looks like one) and you will not find any fancy tasting room or entrance.

It was dissappointing that they were out of 2 of their 3 main wines, though they did accomodate visitors for this fact by cutting their fee in half ($20 to $10).  They added a 2006 Grenache (100%) which was quite a surprise — it had cinnamon on the nose with some mint, soil and spice on the pallette.

Their 2006 Ribbon Ridge Pinot Noir matched their 93 point rating from Wine Spectator (p.s. Robert Parker is the owner’s brother-in-law… hmmm… )  This wine is from the original vineyard planted in ‘87-88, but it had a tight nose, which will probably open up if you decant, but had tremendous fruit blast in the mouth with long-lasting tannins and spice.

I am going to add a new page to the site specifically for this trip so that it will be easier to see the posts by winery, so be sure to go to the Willamette Valley page from the menu up top or the Page links to the right – link here: http://www.winetonite.com/?page_id=96

talk to you soon…